[The Seven by Nine Squares home page] [SMILE index] [Contents]

Giving Something and Getting Something Else

I'd like to unstart Christopher M.'s topic and flop it on to the cladistics thread. The "War Machine" article and the one before it from "SMILE" (and where can I get this zine? does it actually exist?) seemed to me to be summaries of sections of Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus, a really groovy book that folks are just starting to use in cultural criticism (see the last couple issues of Postmodern Culture for examples...). Anyway, D & G have some very biting critiques of the phallic, "arborescent" (i.e. tree-like) structure of knowledge (esp. in the chapter "Introduction: Rhizome").

I'm really sick of the "what good is theory? Let's do something real" riff, but I'm not sure how to refute it. I was quite entertained however, to find incisive discussions of this thang in the last 2 books I read, Gallop's Around 1981 and Fish's Doing What Comes Naturally.

Jeff Schwartz
Dept. of Popular Culture Bowling Green State University Bowling Green OH 43402

Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1992 17:43 EST
From: JSCHWAR@BGSUOPIE.BITNET